"Where are the bodies for dinner?" (Grace Slick, 1971)

Warning: this item contains descriptions of child abuse which some readers may find disturbing.

You couldn't describe Mum as an adventurous cook. She was handicapped by the fact that Dad could not bear to have anything remotely resembling an onion in the house, including spring onions, leeks, garlic. Suffice to say that when I was sent away to boarding school at 11 years old it was a bit of a shock to be given stuff to eat that wasn't sausages, egg, fishcakes, bacon, or chicken. Suddenly I was being asked to put disgusting things like stews, turnips, liver, grizzly meat of unknown origin etc etc in my actual mouth.

So mealtimes were a source of major anxiety. If I knew it was going to be egg and chips then all was well. Toad-in-the-hole was OK, but may be accompanied by an inedible vegetable of some sort. Almost everything else was a problem. After morning lessons I would run to try to catch someone from the early lunch sitting - and ask what was on the menu, just to get, occasionally, a few minutes of relief.

At our boarding house called "Lyndhurst", we ate in a large dining room with 5 or 6 long tables. The food was served out by the teacher at the end, and the plates passed down the tables. There was no hiding place if you found the plate in front of you to be covered with material that your brain and stomach did not recognise as food. I would make a brave attempt to eat what I could (potato, peas, etc) and hope to get away with passing back a "dirty" plate. One occasion I remember clearly was when I tried to eat a small amount of pumpkin and spewed it back into my glass of water. A tactic I developed was to suddenly run out to the toilet and feign a stomach problem, but you couldn't use this very often, and it meant you couldn't really ask for any dessert.

Frequently - perhaps a couple of times a week - I would be stuck with first-course food on my plate after everyone else had finish their puddings. Then I would have to stand outside the housemaster's office with my plate, knife and fork until I'd finished it. I think most of the time I'd be there until it was time to go to afternoon lessons, so I was off the hook.

This nightmare went on for 3 years until I finally left Lyndhurst and went to "School House" where the tables were smaller and less supervised and nobody really cared what you were or were not eating. And eventually I embraced all sorts of meat and veg (not liver!) - before deciding, in middle age, that I didn't really need to eat any kind of flesh at all.

All of the above flooded back a few months ago when I discovered "avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder" (ARFID aka food neophobia). YES, it's a thing! I wasn't just a freak! Apparently you can develop irrational food phobias as a protective mechanism - your brain knows that some things that would fit in your mouth are dangerous and therefore programmes you to avoid things it does not know to be safe. 

Do you think I can sue? (For the PTSD I mean.)